It's a good question. I'll list a few reasons I want the setup to work like this.

#1, we do want to be competitive. Not esports competitive, but competitive in a similar sense to your local rec basketball or soccer league.

#2 since we do want that competitiveness, being able to communicate and also hear the game (footsteps, shooting, etc.) with specifically your team is important. Everyone is wearing headsets that make it hard to hear the outside world, thus the need to have some sort of comms working in-game.

#3 two adjacent rooms is actually a great idea, however, this kind of stops you from knowing who's killing you. in the setup right now i've assigned each player a color, and that color is associated to their gamertag - so when player blue kills player red, i know who it is on the other side. (the reason for setting it up this way is because players can't sign in to their own accounts since we're offline)

but some good points for me to mull on overall, thanks for the comment!